Today I took my brother with me on a long drive to Þingvellir and Geysir. I took lots of pictures and clicking on the picture here on the left will take you to my Flickr where you can see the rest.

It was incredibly nice to get out of the city and just walk around for a while. The weather was lovely, the sun was out and everything was so very green and bright and beautiful.

Right now my brother and I are watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I usually love the Indiana Jones movies, even the new one. I absolutely hate Willie, the woman in this one. She’s so very annoying and so very stereotypically female (in a bad way). I’m just sitting here hoping that maybe at some point she’ll shut the hell up!

Two new studies have quantified what advocates for young women’s health have observed for years: the striking frequency with which it is in fact young men who try to force their partners to get pregnant. Their goal: not to settle down as family men but rather to exert what is perhaps the most intimate, and lasting, form of control. (“Control” may also include attempts to force both pregnancy and abortion, even in the same relationship.)

A Flinders University study of 965 women over 30 who used Adelaide’s largest abortion clinic found 62 per cent were using contraception when they became pregnant.

Nursing and Midwifery researcher Wendy Abigail said the vast majority of the remainder of women also had not wanted to become pregnant.

She said they were not using contraception for dozens of reasons such as: cultural bans, thinking they could never have children, having been raped or having had what was thought to have been “permanent” birth-control surgery.

Ms Abigail blamed primarily male politicians for perpetuating the myth that women used termination as a convenience rather than for emotional and medical reasons.